--- title: "What Forbes Betting on Creators Means for Media Careers in 2026" canonical: "https://www.metaintro.com/blog/forbes-betting-on-creators-media-careers-2026" language: "en" author: "drashtigarach" published: "2026-06-23T10:24:14.000Z" modified: "2026-10-02T19:37:25.695Z" --- [Back to Blog](/blog) [Media](/blog/tag/media)[Career](/blog/tag/career)[Jobs](/blog/tag/jobs)[Advice](/blog/tag/advice)[News](/blog/tag/news)[Information](/blog/tag/information) # What Forbes Betting on Creators Means for Media Careers in 2026 Forbes just launched a creator network as media cut 17,000 jobs in 2025. See where paid media work is shifting and how to position your career today. [![Drashti Garach](https://cdn.metaintro.com/rs:fill:40:40/q:72/plain/images/5719d740-e510-42bc-8017-e040d145f35f_1766029465094.png)Drashti Garach @DrashtiGarach](/blog/author/drashtigarach) [June 23, 2026](/blog/archive/2026/06)Updated October 2, 202613 min read ![What Forbes Betting on Creators Means for Media Careers in 2026](https://cdn.metaintro.com/rs:fill:1200:675/q:78/plain/images/5018-hero.png) [https://x.com/intent/tweet?text=What%20Forbes%20Betting%20on%20Creators%20Means%20for%20Media%20Careers%20in%202026&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fforbes-betting-on-creators-media-careers-2026](https://x.com/intent/tweet?text=What%20Forbes%20Betting%20on%20Creators%20Means%20for%20Media%20Careers%20in%202026&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fforbes-betting-on-creators-media-careers-2026)[http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fforbes-betting-on-creators-media-careers-2026](http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fforbes-betting-on-creators-media-careers-2026)[https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fforbes-betting-on-creators-media-careers-2026&title=What%20Forbes%20Betting%20on%20Creators%20Means%20for%20Media%20Careers%20in%202026](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fforbes-betting-on-creators-media-careers-2026&title=What%20Forbes%20Betting%20on%20Creators%20Means%20for%20Media%20Careers%20in%202026)[mailto:?subject=What%20Forbes%20Betting%20on%20Creators%20Means%20for%20Media%20Careers%20in%202026&body=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fforbes-betting-on-creators-media-careers-2026](mailto:?subject=What%20Forbes%20Betting%20on%20Creators%20Means%20for%20Media%20Careers%20in%202026&body=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fforbes-betting-on-creators-media-careers-2026) If you work in media and you are wondering what the [Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/pr/2026/06/22/forbes-expands-into-creator-led-storytelling-with-launch-of-new-creator-network/) Creator Network actually means for your job, here is the short answer. On June 22, 2026, Forbes launched a social-first network built around creators, entrepreneurs, and subject matter experts rather than only staff reporters, and it points to where paid media work is heading. Legacy newsrooms are shrinking while audience-owning creators are getting the budget. At [Metaintro](https://www.metaintro.com), we track how moves like this reshape who gets hired, who gets paid, and what skills the market now rewards. This guide breaks down the shift and exactly how to position your career for it. ## What Exactly Did Forbes Launch and Why Now? According to the announcement covered by [Talking Biz News](https://talkingbiznews.com/media-news/forbes-creates-creator-content-effort/), the Forbes Creator Network is a social-first operation designed to produce original content and develop intellectual property across social media, video, podcasts, and live experiences. It is built to bring together trusted industry experts and influential creators under the Forbes brand, extending the publisher's reach to the places where audiences now discover ideas. Forbes also named a new VP, Chloe Moore, to oversee creator partnerships and talent strategy, and expanded the role of its head of video, Tim Pierson, to steer creator content. A new "creator correspondents" program will debut at the Forbes Power Women's Summit in September, giving creators access to the Forbes Live event ecosystem to report from inside the room. The timing is the real story. A 110-year-old business publication is not building a creator arm as a vanity project. It is following the audience and the money. Forbes CEO Sherry Phillips framed the move as a way to inform and connect audiences wherever they shape conversations, which is a polite way of saying the front page is no longer where the attention lives. When an institution this established formalizes a creator strategy, it is a signal to everyone in media that the old model of hiring staff writers to fill a website is giving way to a model of partnering with people who already command a following. ## How Bad Are Media Layoffs Right Now? The backdrop to this launch is brutal, and it explains why publishers are rethinking who they pay. Across television, film, broadcast, news, and streaming, more than 17,000 jobs were cut in the first 11 months of 2025, an 18 percent jump over the prior year, according to outplacement firm [Challenger, Gray and Christmas](https://www.challengergray.com/) as reported by [TheWrap](https://www.thewrap.com/industry-news/business/entertainment-media-layoffs-2025-analysis/). The firm tied most of those cuts to restructuring and industry consolidation, the kind of structural change that does not bounce back when the economy improves. These are not temporary furloughs. They are roles that are disappearing for good. What makes these cuts different from past downturns is the reason behind them. Challenger has repeatedly pointed to restructuring, consolidation, and the spread of automation rather than a simple ad recession, which means many of these roles are not coming back when budgets recover. For media workers that distinction matters enormously. A cyclical layoff is something you wait out. A structural one is something you adapt to, because the job description itself is being rewritten. The publishers doing the cutting are often the same ones now building creator arms, which tells you they are not abandoning content. They are changing who they pay to make it and how that work gets owned. Journalism specifically has been hammered for years, even if the pace cooled slightly. At least 3,444 journalism jobs were eliminated across the United States and United Kingdom in 2025, with roughly two thirds of those in the US, according to tracking by [Press Gazette](https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/journalism-job-cuts-2025-tracked/). That figure was about 11 percent lower than 2024, which sounds like relief until you remember it is layered on top of a decade of contraction. The longer arc is worse. The US [Bureau of Labor Statistics](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/reporters-correspondents-and-broadcast-news-analysts.htm) projects employment of news analysts, reporters, and journalists to decline 4 percent from 2024 to 2034, with a median annual wage of 60,280 dollars as of May 2024. The salaried newsroom job is becoming a smaller and smaller slice of the media labor market. We covered one sharp example of this in [BBC Cuts 2,000 Jobs in Biggest Workforce Reduction in 15 Years](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/bbc-2000-job-cuts-2026-media-layoffs), and another in [150 ProPublica Journalists Walk Out in First Major U.S. Newsroom Strike Over AI Protections](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/propublica-150-journalists-strike-ai-protections-newsroom-unions-2026). ## Where Is the Money Actually Moving in Media? Here is the counterintuitive part. Media as an employer is shrinking, but media as a market is booming. The creator economy is on track to roughly double to 480 billion dollars by 2027 from around 250 billion dollars, according to research from [Goldman Sachs](https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/the-creator-economy-could-approach-half-a-trillion-dollars-by-2027). The same research counts roughly 50 million global creators and expects that population to grow at a 10 to 20 percent annual rate over five years, with income flowing through brand deals, platform ad revenue shares, subscriptions, and direct fan payments. The dollars are not leaving media. They are moving from payroll lines to partnership lines. That is the shift Forbes is responding to. Instead of hiring a staff writer at a fixed salary to produce articles a brand owns outright, publishers increasingly want to partner with a creator who brings their own audience, splits the upside, and carries their reputation across platforms. The relationship looks less like employment and more like a deal. For media workers this is both a threat and an opening. The threat is that traditional staff roles keep thinning. The opening is that the same forces creating that pressure are also creating a 480 billion dollar pool of paid work for people who can build and hold an audience. We unpacked the scale of that opportunity in [How a New AI Startup Plans to Eat the 1 Trillion Dollar Creator Economy in 2026](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/chronicle-studios-ai-creator-economy-2026), which is worth reading alongside this one. ## Is Becoming a Full-Time Creator Realistic for Most People? It is realistic for more people than it used to be, but the math demands honesty. Goldman Sachs estimates only about 4 percent of global creators qualify as professionals earning six figures, and that share is expected to stay roughly flat even as the overall pie grows. In plain terms, the top of the market is crowded and competitive, and most creators do not replace a full salary on platform income alone. So the smart move for a media worker is rarely to quit and gamble everything on going viral. It is to treat creator skills as a second engine that runs alongside, or eventually replaces, traditional income on your own timeline. The realistic paths are wider than the influencer stereotype suggests. Some media workers stay employed and build an audience on the side, which makes them more valuable to their current employer and more hireable elsewhere. Some move into hybrid roles where a publisher pays them to create under a brand while they keep their own channel. Others go fully independent through newsletters, video, podcasts, or paid communities. We mapped these tradeoffs in [How to Land a Content Creator Job in 2026](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/content-creator-job) and in [What Building a Company Without a Traditional Job Teaches Career Changers in 2026](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/building-company-without-traditional-job-career-changers-2026). The point is that "creator" is not one job. It is a spectrum of arrangements, and you can step onto it without leaping off a cliff. ## What Skills Do Publishers Now Want From Creators? The skill set publishers are buying has changed, and journalism credentials alone no longer carry the day. The first thing they want is an audience. When Forbes builds a network around creators, it is paying partly for the followers and trust those creators already own. That makes audience-building, the unglamorous work of consistently publishing and growing a following on a platform you can take with you, one of the most valuable career skills in media right now. It is also why a strong public profile matters more than ever, a point we make in [How a Strong Personal Brand Can Accelerate Your Career in 2026](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/personal-brand-accelerate-career-2026). Beyond audience, publishers want format range and platform fluency. The Forbes network spans social, video, podcasts, and live events, which means the people who win partnerships can move a single idea across formats rather than only writing 800-word posts. Comfort on camera, audio production basics, short-form video instincts, and an understanding of how each platform's distribution works are now core, not optional. Forbes even cited AI-driven cost pressure as part of the wider industry backdrop, and creators who can use AI tools to produce faster without losing their voice are the ones who scale. We dug into how that automation is reshaping creative work in [The Creative Middle Is Disappearing, How AI Is Flattening 40% of Design and Writing Work](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/ai-creativity-average-creative-careers-2026) and in [AI Scraping Is the Newest Media Industry in 2026 and It's Replacing Reporters](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/ai-scraping-media-industry-2026-replacing-reporters). The creators who thrive treat AI as leverage on their judgment, not a replacement for it. ## How Should Media Workers Position for This Shift? Treat the Forbes move as a preview of where every publisher is heading, then get ahead of it deliberately. Start by building a portable audience you own, separate from any single employer. A newsletter list, a YouTube channel, or a following on a platform where you can export your reach all count. The goal is that if your staff job vanishes tomorrow, your audience does not. This is the same logic behind treating yourself like a business rather than a job title, which we cover in [How to Start a Freelance Business Before You Need One](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/how-to-start-freelance-business-before-you-need-one). Second, package your work so a publisher can see what you would bring to a partnership. That means a clear public body of work, evidence of audience and engagement, and a sense of the niche you own. If you are coming from a traditional role, learn to present freelance and creator work the way employers and partners now read it, which we break down in [How to Format Freelance Work on Your Resume in 2026](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/freelance-work-resume). Third, diversify your income early so you are never dependent on one platform or one client. Brand deals, licensing, subscriptions, consulting, and events can stack into something more stable than a single salary ever was, and managing several income streams is its own skill, as we explain in [How to Manage Multiple Freelance Clients Without Burning Out](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/manage-multiple-freelance-clients-without-burning-out-2026). ## What Does This Mean for Your Career? The Forbes Creator Network is a small launch with a large message. The institutions that used to hire staff to fill a publication are now spending their growth budgets on people who arrive with their own audiences. Here is how to act on that: - Build a portable audience now, on a platform you can take with you, so your reach does not belong to an employer. - Treat creator skills as a second income engine you grow alongside your current job, not a cliff you jump off. - Develop format range: writing, audio, short-form video, and live presence, because partnerships go to people who can move one idea across channels. - Learn to use AI tools to produce faster while protecting your voice and judgment, the part no tool can replace. - Document and package your work so a publisher can instantly see the audience and niche you would bring to a deal. - Diversify income across brand deals, subscriptions, licensing, and events so no single platform controls your livelihood. - Keep your traditional craft sharp, because the creators publishers trust most are the ones whose work is credible, not just popular. The media worker who wins the next decade is not necessarily the one with the most prestigious masthead on their resume. It is the one who owns an audience, can create across formats, and treats their career like the portable, self-directed business the market is now rewarding. If you want a wider view of making that kind of jump, our [Career Change Guide for 2026](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/when-good-job-stops-being-good-enough-career-change-guide-2026) is a useful starting point. --- ## Related Articles - [How to Land a Content Creator Job in 2026](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/content-creator-job) - [How a Strong Personal Brand Can Accelerate Your Career in 2026](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/personal-brand-accelerate-career-2026) - [How a New AI Startup Plans to Eat the 1 Trillion Dollar Creator Economy in 2026](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/chronicle-studios-ai-creator-economy-2026) - [The Creative Middle Is Disappearing, How AI Is Flattening 40% of Design and Writing Work](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/ai-creativity-average-creative-careers-2026) - [AI Scraping Is the Newest Media Industry in 2026 and It's Replacing Reporters](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/ai-scraping-media-industry-2026-replacing-reporters) - [BBC Cuts 2,000 Jobs in Biggest Workforce Reduction in 15 Years](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/bbc-2000-job-cuts-2026-media-layoffs) - [150 ProPublica Journalists Walk Out in First Major U.S. Newsroom Strike Over AI Protections](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/propublica-150-journalists-strike-ai-protections-newsroom-unions-2026) - [What Building a Company Without a Traditional Job Teaches Career Changers in 2026](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/building-company-without-traditional-job-career-changers-2026) - [How to Start a Freelance Business Before You Need One](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/how-to-start-freelance-business-before-you-need-one) - [How to Format Freelance Work on Your Resume in 2026](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/freelance-work-resume) - [How to Manage Multiple Freelance Clients Without Burning Out](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/manage-multiple-freelance-clients-without-burning-out-2026) - [When Your Good Job Stops Being Good Enough, A Career Change Guide for 2026](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/when-good-job-stops-being-good-enough-career-change-guide-2026) --- ## People Also Asked ### Q: What is the Forbes Creator Network? A: It is a social-first network Forbes launched on June 22, 2026 to produce original content and intellectual property across social media, video, podcasts, and live events. Instead of relying only on staff reporters, Forbes partners with creators, entrepreneurs, and subject matter experts who bring their own audiences, and it will run a creator correspondents program at its Power Women's Summit in September. ### Q: Is the media industry actually shrinking? A: Staff employment is shrinking even as the broader market grows. Challenger tracked more than 17,000 entertainment and media layoffs in the first 11 months of 2025, up 18 percent on the prior year, and the BLS projects journalist employment to decline 4 percent from 2024 to 2034. At the same time the creator economy is on track to reach 480 billion dollars by 2027, so the paid work is moving rather than vanishing. ### Q: How do I move from a media job into creator work? A: Build a portable audience on a platform you can take with you, develop range across writing, audio, and video, and document your work so a publisher can see the niche and reach you offer. Treat it as a second income engine alongside your job at first, then diversify across brand deals, subscriptions, and events before going fully independent. The goal is to own your audience so your livelihood does not depend on one employer. Ready to navigate the shift from staff jobs to creator partnerships before it forces your hand? The media careers that hold up are the ones built on a portable audience and skills that travel across platforms. [Join Metaintro](https://www.metaintro.com/signup) to get the career intelligence, hiring trends, and practical guides that help you position for where media work is actually moving, not where it used to be. ### Share this article [https://x.com/intent/tweet?text=What%20Forbes%20Betting%20on%20Creators%20Means%20for%20Media%20Careers%20in%202026&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fforbes-betting-on-creators-media-careers-2026](https://x.com/intent/tweet?text=What%20Forbes%20Betting%20on%20Creators%20Means%20for%20Media%20Careers%20in%202026&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fforbes-betting-on-creators-media-careers-2026)[http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fforbes-betting-on-creators-media-careers-2026](http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fforbes-betting-on-creators-media-careers-2026)[https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fforbes-betting-on-creators-media-careers-2026&title=What%20Forbes%20Betting%20on%20Creators%20Means%20for%20Media%20Careers%20in%202026](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fforbes-betting-on-creators-media-careers-2026&title=What%20Forbes%20Betting%20on%20Creators%20Means%20for%20Media%20Careers%20in%202026)[mailto:?subject=What%20Forbes%20Betting%20on%20Creators%20Means%20for%20Media%20Careers%20in%202026&body=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fforbes-betting-on-creators-media-careers-2026](mailto:?subject=What%20Forbes%20Betting%20on%20Creators%20Means%20for%20Media%20Careers%20in%202026&body=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fforbes-betting-on-creators-media-careers-2026) For job seekers ## The job you want exists. 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